Paris, Religion and Human Evil

I have been working for some years on the issue of moral behavior in animals: not moral behavior towards animals – animal rights and things like that, although I work on that too – but moral behavior in animals.

Frans de Waal has argued, in a groundbreaking series of books and articles, that the evolutionary roots of morality are present in at least some animals – the social mammals in particular. I, like Mark Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, would go further. It is not just that the roots of morality are present in some other animals. These other animals are not really proto-moral variants but genuinely moral creatures. My account is based on a form of moral sentimentalism: morality is grounded in emotions or sentiments, ones that concern the welfare of others. Empathy – receptive rather than projective – is a crucial component in this view, understood not as an emotion but as the ability to have emotions that reflect the emotional states of another. I accept that humans can be moral in ways that other animals can’t: we can reflect on our motivations, assess them in the light of moral principles, and so on. Nevertheless, there is a way of acting morally that humans engage in – a way grounded in empathic response. Some other animals can engage in this too, and, crucially, when they do so, they are being moral in exactly the same way that humans are. Humans can be moral in ways that animals can’t. But some animals can be moral in (one of the) ways that humans can. Some might think of this as an elevation of animals to the moral level of humans. But that’s a human slant on it. I like to think of it the other way around: I take great comfort in the thought that I might be as morally good as the dogs that have shared my life.

The result of this was a book that came out a few years ago. John Shand quipped, in a review of the book: “To hell with animals being moral, can humans be moral?” The tragic events that unfolded in Paris on Friday night show not only that this question a legitimate one, but also throw into sharp relief the other side of our moral nature.

First, let’s call these acts what they are: evil. Evil is not a supernatural force. Evil consists in very bad things. If a person does enough very bad things, with intent, and on a regular enough basis, they are an evil person. (Responsibility has nothing to do with good and evil on the view I defend). On Friday night, some evil people did some evil things. Some think religion is the cause of the sorts of evil perpetrated that night. Of course, it is the proximal cause. But the underlying – distal – cause is more important. Religion is never the ultimate cause of our hatreds, but an ex post facto justification for our hatreds – hatreds that we had anyway, and for other reasons. First we hate, and then we construct reasons to justify - in our eyes, at least – our hatreds. The desire to exclude is at least as deeply entrenched as empathy. Religion is a very useful ex post facto excuse for our hatreds, but there are other forms of excuse. These excuses usually take the form of an ‘ism’. People used to bomb the streets of Paris in the name of anarchism. Now it is Islamism. There will always be some or other ‘ism’: the need for some or other ‘ism’ is an expression of a deeply entrenched and extremely unflattering part of our nature. This is the desire to exclude, and to hate those we exclude. This desire to exclude is also part of our animal nature. Empathy on one side, exclusion on the other. These are the twin poles of our nature.

President Obama characterized these events as an, ‘attack on humanity’. I know what he means, but it is not accurate. The perpetrators are moral monsters – true. But they are also moral monsters that happen to be human. The worst monsters are always human. It is not an attack on humanity but on civilization. For civilization, as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche understood, is the defense we erect against ourselves: a barrier we erect against the worst aspects of ourselves – against the most dangerous and unflattering characteristics of our human nature. Civilization is predicated on a tacit understanding of what we are, the tendencies we have, and the acts of which are capable. Most animals don’t have a civilization: they don’t need it. It is only a truly nasty creature that needs a civilization.